Basic checks

• I searched existing issues - this hasn't been reported
• I can reproduce this consistently
• This is a RubyLLM bug, not my application code

What's broken?

message.content can be four different types (String, Hash, Content, Content::Raw) depending on where in the lifecycle you access it. This makes it difficult to work with reliably, and Content::Raw lacks a to_s implementation, so any code using .to_s gets #<RubyLLM::Content::Raw:0x...>.

How to reproduce

Use any chat with a schema and ActiveRecord persistence:

chat = chat_model.create!
chat.with_schema(MySchema)
chat.ask("first question")  # response.content is a Hash (after JSON.parse)
chat.ask("second question")  # previous response reloaded as Content::Raw

Expected behavior

Content type is normalized and stays consistent regardless of whether the message was just created or loaded from the database

At minimum, Content::Raw should implement to_s

What actually happened

On the second turn, to_llm reloads messages from the database. The first response's content, which was a Hash in memory, is now a Content::Raw wrapping that same Hash.

Environment

• Ruby version: 3.2.2
• RubyLLM version: 1.14.0
• Rails version: 7.2.3
• Provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.): OpenAI